The title of my earlier post, "Postcard from Polewali" turns out to be ironic. I spent some time today walking the streets trying various shops and the post office, but it turns out that the town of Polewali does not consider itself worthy of producing such a thing as a simple postcard. People were familiar with the concept – kartu pos –– but couldn't recall actually seeing them for sale anywhere. The guy in the post office was willing to estimate the postage, should I be able to find one, and sell me the necessary stamps, but I have a feeling those stamps will remain unused. It shouldn't come as a surprise, I guess. As you can see from my snaps below, Polewali is not a pretty town and it doesn't attract the kind of people who might want to send postcards, i.e. tourists.
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The mean streets of Polewali
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The Hotel Ratih and its less salubrious neighbour
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In our week staying here, we haven't seen any other Westerners, and we invariably create a minor commotion walking down the street, just by being different (even when I'm wearing my batik shirt).
Usually it's just the standard "Hello mister, hello missus", but variants include horn honking, dangerous turning of heads while riding of motor scooters, occasional pointing (as if to say "Hey white people, look at the funny white people"), and clustering of amazed, hysterically laughing schoolkids. It is always good-natured, often involves a photograph, and sometimes develops into an actual conversation if either party has the time and language.
The other thing that makes us oddities is possibly that we are walking. You certainly don't catch many locals doing it, and we are constantly being offered more acceptable options, such as becaks and pete-pete (micro vans with bench seats, standard fare 0.30 cents). It's not hard to see why. There are no footpaths, just a choice between the general roadside rubble and the drainage ditch, which is sometimes covered but mostly open. Cars park wherever they want on the road edge, which means you often have to dodge out into the traffic lane where becaks and scooters weave between trucks and the occasional car, all with plenty of horn honking but precious few actual collisions [touches wooden object, makes sign of cross].
The streetscape along the main street consists mainly of dark, dingy, broken facades hosting every kind of business from restaurants and warkops (warung kopi = coffeeshops) to motorbike repair shops and a surprising number of photocopy services. Interspersed are precincts for schools and the library, which are a little grander, and the stark contrast of a spotless and brightly lit Alfamart store.
Oddly, the town is spread over a few kilometres, with a stretch of rice paddies in the middle, maybe on lower lying land, which provides some visual relief but adds to the travelling. We are staying the newly completed and certainly grand (but unfortunately named) Hotel Ratih, but the block next door looks like a bomb zone in Baghdad. In short, Polewali is a hard town.
Having said that, we have eaten well here. The regional specialty is ikan bakar (barbecued fish), cooked on an open grill out the front of the shop. Before you enter you choose your fish from the selection on ice in a polystyrene esky, It's basted in some kind of delicious garlicky spicy paste and goes down well with some cap cai (mixed vegetables, but the local variant must include some prawns), nasi putih and an es jeruk or jus melon (iced orange juice or melon juice). The heat conjures up dreams of ice cold beer, but that is only available in the swankier hotels (like the Ratih) and even then you need to give the staff notice to put it in the fridge.
Polewali improves, though, as soon as you get a block or two from the main street, where the newer houses and ruko are going up amid the rice fields, and within a kilometre or two you are in another world of the desa (village) and dusun (whatever is smaller than a village!). This is where Sue and I have been spending most of our mornings up until 1 or 2 pm, primarily examining the cocoa trees belonging to a couple of local farmers, but also getting a little glimpse of village life.
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Ikan bakar
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The ubiquitous kecap manis: "NEW: Blacker, more deliciously salty and oily, thicker".
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Sue relaxing on the balai balai with tools of the trade
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Each morning at 8 we are called for by a couple of guys on motor scooters who dink us (a mode of transport called ojek) the 5 or 6 kilometres through the rice paddies to the village of Beluak. It's an absolute mood-changer, a great way to start the day, despite the occasional white man's worries about accidents, travel insurance and whether the rate of $2 one way that we are paying them will distort the local economy, since the recommended rate was only $1.
Our first day on our own in the cocoa field looked like being a fizzer when the reality of the trees didn't match Sue's plans, but our host Pak Arafin was more concerned that we should attend the ceremony taking place in the village's open air mosque (no domes, no minarets). We were ushered in, shoeless, and with a bit of shuffling seated on the floor in the loosely segregated groups, me with the men, Sue with the women and children. There was a sermon from a young and friendly looking vicar (imam?) that I didn't understand, but which got a few laughs, and a central arrangement of a banana tree hung with little baskets containing boiled eggs. It all reminded me of Easter.
It turns out that it was Maulid,the celebration of Muhammad's birth, celebrated in some Muslim countries but frowned upon in others; hence my sense of it being about new life was not far off. After the formal part of the service the women whipped out plates food they had prepared and after a lot of deferring to each other we all tucked in. It was all incredibly friendly and relaxed. Yes, there were some jilbab (headscarves), but there were bareheaded women as well and none of that seemed to matter. Despite our obvious status as non-believers, we were given the gifts of the small egg trees to take away at the end of the ceremony.
Another day, after 4 hours work in the increasing heat, we are walking back to Pak Arafin's place and notice a couple of houses with goods for sale in the front window, which is common in the villages. "Ada minuman es?" (Do you have ice drinks?) I ask hopefully. "Ada", is the correct reply. We happily sit on the plastic chairs while the ibu of the house/warung mixes ice from an esky, a bit of water and our choice of flavour sachet in a blender and a minute later we are revelling in a couple of slurpies as feeling the core temperature drop back to normal. To the point where we follow up with a bowl of instant noodles; a simple but incredibly reviving snack. As we pay and leave, ibu is serving her next customer who is buying one of the bottles of petrol she has lined up on a rack, to top up his van.
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Pak Syukur's house with the balai balai and table tennis table in the "carport".
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The village of Beluak, Anreapi
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Pak Arafin and family, and a crop of coconuts
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It turns out that it was Maulid,the celebration of Muhammad's birth, celebrated in some Muslim countries but frowned upon in others; hence my sense of it being about new life was not far off. After the formal part of the service the women whipped out plates food they had prepared and after a lot of deferring to each other we all tucked in. It was all incredibly friendly and relaxed. Yes, there were some jilbab (headscarves), but there were bareheaded women as well and none of that seemed to matter. Despite our obvious status as non-believers, we were given the gifts of the small egg trees to take away at the end of the ceremony.
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Pak Arafin and family with the egg trees
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The ice and petrol lady
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On Saturday as we had finished up our work in Pak Syukur's plantation, it seemed the whole village was kicking back. The young boys were playing table tennis under a kind of carport strung with election banners to stop the ball going too far. The older boys were dozing on the raised balai balai (deckhouse) with their music player pumping out "Hotel California" and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" at a not unneighbourly volume, while somewhere across the fields some other 80s rock was answering the call. The girls, however, may well have been doing some housework inside.
Village life seems to occur in a loose kind of privacy; washing, snoozing, coming and going all go on in the public space and there is a lot of what seems like just sitting around. The schoolgirls wear headscarves, but outside of school they seem much less common, here at least. Slowly we have forged some relationships here in Beluak and I'm hoping that when we return in April we will take up Pak Arafin's offer of accommodation at his house. If we can turn our backs on air-con, beer and a swimming pool for a week or two.
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Hard to resist: Hotel Ratih
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Did I mention that we also went in search of a waterfall advertised on the internet, but deceptively difficult to find. To make things more interesting, we (OK, I) had chartered this most inappropriate vehicle for mountain climbing on rough roads: the urban pete-pete. But our fearless driver Hendra persevered and joined us on the 1 hour climb. More pics to come.
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